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The Confusions of Yalta
Yalta’s tantalizing combination of political drama and deep public
emotion, as well as the urge to understand an event that so obviously
lies near the center of the break-up of what Churchill liked to call “the
Grand Alliance,” has engaged many historians. There is also a natural
professional interest in transitions, in the way great conflicts end and
lead into a new, often unanticipated phase. But Yalta, even when viewed
simply as a technical problem in diplomatic history, presents more
difficulties than most such cases. The conference lasted only ten days;
it took place before the end of the war whose ravages it supposedly
aspired to mend; and it was conducted in complete secrecy. The other
great terminal conferences of modern history seem transparently clear
by contrast. The 1815 Congress of Vienna is generally seen as a success
because the plenipotentiaries knew each other and took their time. They
wined, dined, and seduced their way through about a year of spasmodic
activity. “The conference dances but it does not move,” complained one
observer.1 Still, they created, at least temporarily (some would say for a
century), a stable, post-Napoleonic order. The Paris Peace Conference of
1919 self-consciously followed this model; it also took several months,
and though it is generally regarded as a failure today we at least have a
clear record and a substantial measure of academic agreement as to the
aims of the Great Powers and what was said and done.2
1
2
Attributed to Prince Charles-Joseph Ligne. Tim Blanning, Times Literary Supplement,
June 13, 2003.
See Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919 (New York, 2002); and Charles K. Webster, The
Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (London, 1920).
1
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Yalta was not a conventional, punctuating negotiation in this sense.
Indeed, there was no such comprehensive peace conference after World
War II. Instead, we see a string of often hastily arranged meetings between
1941 and 1946, several of which may be held to have contributed in some
measure to the final outcome. Naturally, the three great summit conferences
have drawn much attention: Teheran in 1943, a strategy-oriented meeting
that saw the introduction of basic but not yet crystallized political themes;
Yalta in February 1945, for better or worse a kind of creative, architectural
moment; and Potsdam in mid-1945, a necessary confrontation with practical postwar problems. But, as will be seen, this narrow fixation on the
three summits offers only a spurious clarity – a brilliant surface, certainly,
but one that elevates the “Big Three” concept excessively and obscures and
diminishes less glamorous negotiations and a number of other causative
impulses.
The high public emotion that Yalta has always inspired is another problematic for the historian. The wide variety of entrenched perspectives is
daunting. These include a bitter Polish interpretation, natural enough
considering the territorial and political violations visited upon that tragic
country; a deeply resentful French view, soon to become a generalized
European sense of subjection to a United States–Soviet hegemony; a British
suggestion of a hard-won victory prejudiced by tragically clumsy diplomacy on the part of the two emergent superpowers; a Soviet belief that
President Harry S. Truman, abetted by Churchill and American capitalists,
betrayed Roosevelt’s well-intentioned Yalta commitments; a conservative
charge in the United States that FDR had been either traitorous or incompetently naïve; and the Truman administration’s conviction that Stalin
had violated his Yalta pledges, especially his declared acceptance of Polish
independence and Eastern European democracy.3
The natural corrective to a witches’ brew of this kind would have been
a full documentary account. None was made available until the official
American record of Yalta was released in 1955. By that time politicians,
editorialists, and memoirists had established the dominating, sharply edged
images. Yalta had already become not only a primary cause of dissension
between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also a symbol for the
3
See, variously, R. Umiastowski, Poland, Russia and Great Britain, 1941–1945, A Study
of Evidence (London, 1946); Arthur Conte, Yalta ou le Partage du Monde (Paris, 1966);
Chester Wilmot, Struggle for Europe (London, 1952); Diane Clemens, Yalta (New York,
1970); Felix Wittmer, The Yalta Betrayal: Data on the Decline and Fall of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (Caldwell, Idaho, 1953); and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Origins of the Cold
War,” Foreign Affairs (October 1967), pp. 22–52.
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The Confusions of Yalta
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Europeans of their eclipse at the hands of the two supposedly hegemonic
superpowers; a token for small countries of Great Power domination; and
a harsh measuring point for many Americans of Roosevelt’s reputation.
By the time an authentic record had become available all these feelings
were already deeply entrenched, as indeed they are to this day. Historians
had already lost the battle for definition. Much of their effort thereafter
was concerned with only half-successful attempts to discredit proliferating myths rather than with patient reconstruction.4
The Cold War inevitably brought its own distorting pressures. There
was a widely felt need everywhere, but especially in the United States,
whose citizens felt that they had been suddenly pitchforked into a role that
cut right across their historical tradition of detachment from Europe, for
quick explanations of the disappointing outcome of World War II and for
justifications of the new, assertive postwar policies. Yalta – initially portrayed by the Big Three as a great success and then, within weeks, exhibited to the world as a failure – was quickly and perhaps inevitably seized
upon as the crucially causative diplomatic event and was then caught up in
a worldwide media whirlwind of partisanship and recrimination that only
slowly spilled over into academic circles. Professional historians during
the Cold War wrote books about Yalta that endeavored to be even-handed
but that, as we will see, tended to mirror the political atmosphere of the
day. It was difficult to be objective. There was an emphasis on answers and
justification. Complexities were brushed aside as Yalta was made to serve,
as it still does today, as a shorthand explanation of the origins of the Cold
War, much as “Munich” has been used since 1939 as a catch-all reference
point for the lead-up to World War II. And there is nothing more functional than today’s conventional view, a distillation of Yalta’s many diverse
characteristics, that the three powers created there the postwar division of
Europe as well as “Yalta orders” for that continent and Asia.
We are talking here, to be sure, of images, not reality. The creation of
the symbolic Yalta (or Yaltas) is potentially a large, fascinating subject in
cultural-intellectual as well as political terms. But my main purpose in this
book is simply to offer an explanation of Yalta itself and not, except in
4
The United States documentary record is in FRUS, The Conferences at Malta and
Yalta, 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1955). The British records are in PREM 3/51/4. The
Soviet government’s published account is The Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences:
Documents (Moscow, 1960). Three varying perspectives on Yalta are found in John Snell
(ed.), The Meaning of Yalta: Big Three Diplomacy and the New Balance of Power (Baton
Rouge, La., 1956); Clemens, Yalta; and Russell Buhite, Decisions at Yalta: An Appraisal of
Summit Diplomacy (Wilmington, Del., 1986).
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these ground-clearing comments, to probe deeply into the epidemic imagery that has obscured its real significance. Still, having mentioned some
general reasons for the distortions, it seems appropriate to single out one
tangible cause that does establish some sense of connection between the
event and the image, and also helps explain the extraordinary fervor of the
widespread public emotion we have just noted.
This is the role of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yalta was in many
ways his conference. Stalin chose the remote site, to FDR’s and Churchill’s
dismay, but Roosevelt did most to stage-manage Yalta’s form and character. He began by refusing to join the Europeans in the traditional task
of setting a preliminary agenda. Determined to control the conference’s
presentation, he took with him carefully chosen domestic political figures
who could convey the right impression to the American people. He took
the lead in refusing any independent press coverage and selected a trusted
photographer whose group portraits of the three could be relied upon
to send out from the Crimea a striking image of Allied power and unity.
Viewed bleakly across six decades, these pictures are in fact disturbingly
suggestive far beyond the president’s intentions: Roosevelt manifestly
haggard and ill; Stalin mostly aloof and in most photographs cold as a
statue; Churchill grimly brooding. But at the time the grainy newspaper
reproductions served the cause.5
More to the point, Roosevelt, by artful use of the language he had
persuaded the European allies to accept in the Declaration on Liberated
Europe, gave the world the impression, in the glowing vision he and his
associates created publicly after the conference, that he had been able to
bring about a surprising and deeply gratifying degree of harmony and
constructive promise among the Big Three victors, who would now go on,
under the hospitable auspices of a liberally refashioned world organization,
to build a progressive Wilsonian order of justice and goodwill.6 This oversold vision, which Churchill later likened to “a franudulent prospectus,”
had profound consequences. Roosevelt, suddenly rendered defenseless
by death, was succeeded by Harry S. Truman, who took the view that the
Declaration was a treaty that Stalin, already acting unilaterally and oppressively in Poland and elsewhere, was deceitfully violating. But an increasing
5
6
For conference preparations and recommendations, see FRUS, Yalta, pp. 3–428. For
photographers and censorship, see Roosevelt to Churchill, January 22, 1945, in Warren
Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton,
1984), vol. III, p. 515 (hereafter cited as Correspondence, volume and page).
The Declaration on Liberated Europe is in FRUS, Yalta, pp. 971–973.
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number of Americans also blamed the supposedly naïve FDR, who now
became for many of them (and for even more Europeans) a logical if not
inevitable scapegoat for Yalta’s failure to rein in the Soviets and for much else
that was now going wrong in Europe. Alarming revelations of Roosevelt’s
secret dealings at Yalta – his willingness to give additional United Nations
memberships to the Soviet Union, territorial concessions made to Stalin at
China’s expense, the forced repatriation of Soviet citizens – which emerged
shortly after the conference and mostly after the president’s death, stoked
the fire. As Cold War tensions grew, he became the focus of McCarthy-era
allegations that he had “sold out” Eastern Europe and China at Yalta. He
was accused of treason by American right-wingers. Even some moderate
American opinion was inclined to wonder whether Roosevelt’s dubious
public portrayal of Yalta had not led more or less directly to the breakdown
of United States–Soviet cooperation.7
To put matters in this way, however, is not to endorse any particular
view. The natural question, of course, is why President Roosevelt felt it
necessary to act in this fashion, effectively creating two Yaltas. As we will
see later, he had his reasons, perhaps very good reasons. Let us suspend
judgment. My present purpose is simply to draw attention, in the briefest
possible way, to some of the causes of the initial confusion that set Yalta off
on a Cold War career of polemics, crises, and raw emotions, ending finally
in the strangely distilled “Yalta Order” of today’s common editorial usage.
For the moment it is enough to note that in 1955 President Eisenhower
published the documentary record of the conference. This had the effect of
clearing Roosevelt of “betrayal” charges but left him branded as a “naïve”
statesman who had not properly understood Stalin or Soviet/communist
aims – a charge made by Churchill, with some delicacy but with crystal
clarity, a year on so before in the final volume, Triumph and Tragedy, of his
immensely influential war memoirs.8
We will return in a moment to the various ways in which Yalta was
received in the United States. But first let us see how the combination of
7
8
For the “prospectus” comment and letter, see Churchill to Roosevelt, March 8, 1945,
Correspondence III, pp. 547–551; Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 1, Year of Decisions
(New York, 1955), pp. 15, 24–25, 71–72, 77, 82. See also Athan Theoharis, The Yalta Myths:
An Issue in United States Politics, 1945–1955 (Columbia, Mo., 1970), pp. 19–22, 29–33 and
passim. For Stalin’s reaction to post-Yalta events, see Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain:
Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1986), pp. 95–99.
See Theoharis, The Yalta Myths, pp. 195, 200–202, 206–208 and passim. See also
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston,
1953), pp. 346–402.
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Roosevelt’s supposedly gullible Yalta diplomacy, American postwar hegemony, and Europe’s misery and decline – all increasingly subsumed in the
“Yalta” indictment – encouraged a pervasive sense of victimization in the
old continent. This began immediately after Yalta with the understandably
bitter protests of the Polish exile government in London and their supporters
in the large Polish diaspora over the fate meted out by their supposed allies:
political subjection to the Soviet Union, and severe territorial amputation
in the east with as yet only vague compensation in the west, which, when
regularized, would leave postwar Poland even more beholden to Moscow
as the indispensable protector against German irredentism.9 The French
were also aggrieved from the outset. They, especially General Charles de
Gaulle, resented their exclusion from the conference, manifestly signifying
their lost status. Yalta was henceforth seen in Paris as the symbol first of a
keenly disliked Anglo-American and then of a United States–Soviet hegemony. British writers, drawing on revived memories of President Woodrow
Wilson’s alleged ineptitude in Paris in 1919, soon joined the parade of resentment, beginning in the early 1950s to suggest that Roosevelt had similarly prejudiced a hard-won victory by his irresponsible Yalta diplomacy.10
The circle of grievance soon widened. As they recovered some selfconfidence in international affairs, German spokesmen and writers in
the Federal Republic also began to look to Yalta as a prime source of
their postwar tribulations. By the mid-1950s, as the post-Stalin Soviets
began to talk seductively of “disengagement,” we find German scholars
blaming “the punitive attitude” of the British and Americans at the conference for the division of their country. By this time the Italians were also
expressing the continental angst. The geopolitical theorist Luisi Bonnanti
complained that Italy’s postwar political system, which was often in disarray, had been imposed by the victors at Yalta. Other views occasionally broke through. In 1958 an Italian academic journal even published a
pro-Roosevelt article by an American historian, though the editor found
it necessary to warn his readers in a prefatory note that the author had
not seen fit to mention FDR’s errors at Yalta, for which, he pointed out,
Europe had suffered so much during the previous twelve years.11
9
10
11
Umiastowski, Poland, Russia and Great Britain, pp. 436–441.
Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor, trans. Terence Kilmarton
(New York, 1971), pp. 199, 226. See also Roger Gromand, “De Gaulle et Yalta,” Revue
des Deux Mondes, no. 9 (1982), pp. 629–634; and Wilmot, Struggle for Europe, p. 714
and passim.
H. Herrschaft, “Zur Dokumentation von Jalta,” Militar Politsches Forum, 4, 5 (1955),
pp. 21–31; Luisi Bonate, “L’Italia nel Nuova Sistema Internazionale, 1943–1948,”
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“Eurocentrism” of this kind may perhaps be seen as a mirror image
of what we think of as “Americocentrism.” Both reflect a high degree
of self-preoccupation. The most acute point of sensitivity for European
commentators was the apparent subjection of their continent to the hegemonic Anglo-American and/or Soviet powers. They tended to see Yalta
and all it stood for as an unwelcome and politically annihilating visitation
from outside, an attitude summed up by the headline “Europe Out of the
Game” that the French historian Jean Laloy gave to his discussion of the
consequences of 1940.12 The abdicatory failure or reluctance of continental European historians through the Cold War era to look for alternative explanatory scenarios that might have recognized some purposeful
European political role in the wartime Allied coalition (Anglo-Soviet if not
French) naturally reinforced tendencies in the United States to assume that
there had been an all-encompassing American control of the significant
events.
In general, it was the grievance-ridden French who most strenuously
and creatively asserted the malign significance of Yalta, often attaching more blame to the American “false friends” than to Stalin’s Soviet
Union, which was treated by many Parisian intellectuals as at best a
benign model and at worst a political force of nature whose excesses in
the unfolding of history’s design could be excused. One should not exaggerate French anti-American sentiment. It is demonstrable that Yalta
served for millions of French and other Europeans through the Cold
War as a kind of rallying point for Americophobic sentiment. But balancing this there was also a strong pro-American symbolism associated,
for instance, with memories of Lafayette, World War I, and the Marshall
Plan. For every Jacques Servan-Schreiber raising the alarm in his The
American Challenge one can find a Jean Francois Revel celebrating
American vitality, as he did in his book Without Marx or Jesus. Similarly
with Yalta: Arthur Conte’s critique of Yalta in Le Partage de Monde
must be juxtaposed with the work of a number of other French historians, from Andre Fontaine to Pierre de Senarclens, who have challenged
the notion that it led to an American-mandated division of Europe at
the Crimean meeting.13
12
13
Comunita, 27 (1973), pp. 13–75; Walter Johnson, “L’Opinione Pubblica e la Politica
Estera Americana,” Rassegna Italiana di Politica di Cultura, 35 (1958), pp. 211–224.
Jean Laloy, Yalta: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (New York, 1988), p. 8.
Jacques Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge (New York, 1969); Jean Francois
Revel, Without Marx or Jesus (New York, 1984); Conte, Le Partage du Monde; Andre
Fontaine, Histoire de la Guerre Froide, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1965); Pierre De Senarclens, Yalta
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It was the French too who were initially instrumental in putting Yalta
to constructive uses in Europe. During the Cold War era the continental lament was steadily transformed into a foundation of Europe-wide
solidarity. At every stage in the postwar move toward unity – in the progressive social democratic Franco-British impulses of the late 1940s; during de
Gaulle’s federally oriented “Third Force” period in the 1950s and 1960s;
and later with the idea of a new Europe built around Franco-German reconciliation and leadership – Yalta featured in at least some French public
commentary not simply as a moment of unwanted division imposed from
outside, but as a catastrophe to be transcended, a fresh point of departure.
French President Francois Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl were particularly focused on this. As Mitterand put it in 1989, “Yalta
is the symbol of the division of Europe into zones of power or influence
between the Soviet Union and the United States. I dream of a reconnected,
independent Europe. I dream about it and I work for it.”14
Effusions of this sort, looking beyond the grievances of the immediate
postwar years to a larger European identity and the repudiation of “Yalta’s
dark legacy,” repeatedly appeared in editorial comment at the anniversaries
of the conference and steadily acquired an all-European character. In the
1980s, Eastern Europeans also began to see themselves as part of a continent-wide struggle against what many had long seen as Yalta’s hegemonic
superpower imposition, despite a natural sense of the difficult odds during
the Cold War. The Hungarian intellectual George Konrad, writing in 1984,
drew from the failure of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule the pessimistic conclusion that “it is impossible to alter the Yalta system from inside by
means of dynamic, uncontrolled mass movements.”15 But this jeremiad was
confounded at the end of the decade as the success of the Polish Solidarity
movement, the decisive emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the collaboration of the United States came together in the late 1980s. One of the
striking features of those heady days was the constant reference to a “Yalta
Order,” supposedly now being brought to a welcome close. The Cold War,
whose origins had seemed so messy and complex to many, now appeared to
have a clear start and finish, with the Yalta conference and the destruction
of the Berlin Wall emerging to general approval as the respective political
14
15
(Paris, 1965); Time, April 13, 1987. See also Conte, “Le XXe Siecle,” Nouvelle Revue des
Deux Mondes, 5 (1979), pp. 289–294.
New York Times, November 30, 1989.
“The Post-Yalta Debate: George Konrad Interviewed by Richard Falk and Mary Kaldor,”
World Policy, 2 (1984/1985), pp. 451–466.
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book ends. From the sharp-edged clarity of 1989, the whole world could
now look back to Yalta as the foundational sin of the postwar era.16
How do British attitudes fit in here? It is a question that brings to attention a curious feature of the whole post-Yalta process, namely, the immunity from serious criticism of Britain and its wartime leader. Certain flinty
European conservatives never let Churchill off the hook. In his war memoirs de Gaulle was still grumbling about the “endorsement given by the
Anglo-Saxons at Yalta” to the Soviets. Alexander Solzenhitzen also wrote
scathingly of “the cowardly pens of Roosevelt and Churchill.”17 But this
is unusual. Most British commentators took their line from two influential books. The first to appear was reporter Chester Wilmot’s Struggle for
Europe (1952), which was fiercely critical of Roosevelt’s supposed naivete
at Yalta. Wilmot revived many of the old resentments about American
diplomacy after the previous war and, in the words of one reviewer, “gave
voice to the nagging anti-Americanism that lurked beneath the English
sense of dependency and focused it on Roosevelt.” Fast on the heels of
Wilmot’s book came Churchill’s Triumph and Tragedy (1953), which
faulted the former president with compelling and unique authority and
gave these negative emotions a respectable gloss. Politically this thinking was perfectly compatible with the administrations of Truman and
Eisenhower, with whom Britain was now collaborating closely, and who
had also now turned away self-consciously from Roosevelt’s supposed
legacy.18
Triumph and Tragedy was the last of Churchill’s six volumes on the
Second World War. It included an artfully Brutus-like critique of Roosevelt’s
conduct at Yalta. The historian David Reynolds, in a recent book aptly
titled In Command of History, suggests that “Churchill’s main object …
was to prove that he had been a far-sighted prophet of the Soviet threat”
and “to shift responsibility for Western mistakes on to the Americans.”
American liberal reviewers, with some solicitude for FDR’s reputation,
had seen this coming and had laid down a series of warnings as Churchill’s
previous volumes had appeared. Thus, as early as 1948, the pundit Anne
O’Hare McCormick had expressed admiration for The Gathering Storm
but predicted that when Churchill’s account reached 1945 “the historian
16
17
18
New York Times, April 13, 1988 (Fuentes), and February 17, 1990 (“Yalta II”): The
Sunday Times (London), July 9, 1989.
De Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope, Renewal and Endeavor (New York, 1971), p. 226.
Wilmot, Struggle for Europe, p. 714 and passim; D. C. Watt, “Britain and the
Historiography of the Yalta Conference and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, 13, 1
(Winter 1989), p. 79; Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 346–402.
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Yalta 1945
will have a hard time justifying the statesman.” By that time, however, with
Roosevelt and his closest associate, Harry Hopkins, long dead and the Cold
War in an intense phase, Churchill had an undistracted global audience at
his feet. While discreetly conveying an overall impression of his own percipience and a contrasting American credulity, he explicitly criticized FDR
for his carelessly volunteered statement that no American troops would
remain in Europe after two years and for making the Far Eastern deal with
Stalin (which he called the “least defensible” agreement at Yalta) and went
on to question Roosevelt and (more delicately) other American leaders
for the post-Yalta failure to face up to the fact and implications of Stalin’s
violations.19
For the next two decades this line of thought, lumping Soviet expansionism and Rooseveltian naivete together as primary causes of the Cold
War, appears to have been the accepted wisdom in British thinking about
Yalta. As late as 1985 a respected columnist in The Times, David Watt, condemned “Roosevelt’s fatuous belief in his own abilities to ‘handle’ Stalin in
1944 and 1945.” Not that there was very much scholarly work in Britain
on such topics during most of the postwar era. A traditional suspicion of
“contemporary” history, combined, perhaps, with the perception of declining British power in a fast-changing world, seems to have inhibited the
development of a school of Cold War historians. This was the reverse of
the situation in the United States, where, following World War II, a heightened sense of national power, destiny, and purpose led many toward Cold
War studies. But this juxtaposition, which has over time produced an unfortunate imbalance in the field, was not due simply to emotional distaste
in Britain or to glory mongering in the United States. Much of the difficulty
was that the British documents for the World War II era were released only
in the 1970s, nearly two decades after the American Yalta documents had
appeared. From that moment on, British (and later some American) historians began to break down, to some degree, the politically established
Churchillian view of an intimate Anglo-American wartime relationship
that came to grief with the fateful divergence at and immediately after
Yalta, and to develop a more typically European perspective. But, in general, the Wilmot-Churchill perspective persists in much British thinking.
One finds innumerable echoes of it in books such as R. W. Thompson’s
Churchill and Morton, where the author refers to “the sinister Roosevelt,”
19
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second
World War (London, 2004), pp. 138, 425, 434, 470.
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